Season Synopsis

After a spectacular win in court for a young recording artist, the gifted forensic musicologist, Emma Kord, escapes the media circus to meet a new client, Jennifer Arnold. Jennifer shows Kord an old, handwritten music score of her late father’s - Stanley Arnold, a composer & teacher now disregarded. Kord instantly recognises the score as CHILDHOOD, the smash hit megamusical worth billions at the box office. While Kord’s intuition tells her the score is authentic, logic suggests it can’t be, given that the iconic CHILDHOOD was composed by Sir Max Howarth, the adored and globally successful composer & impresario. Could the score be genuine and Howarth a billion dollar fake? Or is it the score that’s a phoney, created for extortion or revenge? Now that Stanley has taken his secrets to the grave, only Kord, with her extraordinary musical superpowers, will be able to determine the truth.

It’s not long before the press get a scent of blood in the water and the embattled Sir Max comes out fighting. Howarth’s immense power and wealth are entirely born from CHILDHOOD’s three decades of blistering box office success, ditto for his influential wife, Lady Catherine Howarth. These are two supreme showbiz operators whose marriage is their fortress and unstoppable ambition their battleground. For them, losing is simply not an option. But unlike Catherine, Howarth’s armour is weakened by the love he feels for his secret son, Nicki.

As Howarth prepares for a star-studded gala performance of CHILDHOOD, Kord discovers that Howarth studied with Stanley thirty years earlier. Unearthing a tangle of broken relationships between Howarth and the other students under Stanley’s tutorage, Kord realises that each of this tightly knit group has a reason for wanting Howarth destroyed, particularly the hapless Alice, who is Nicki’s mother and Howarth’s jilted lover. But Alice seems too cowed for a fight, although perhaps life has made her a practised liar.

With no hard evidence against Howarth, Kord makes a search for an old, lost CHILDHOOD demo tape recorded by Stanley, that could corroborate Jennifer’s claim. But after a fruitless search and now alerted to a possible revenge conspiracy led by the aggrieved Nicki, Kord wonders if Howarth’s only real crime was abandoning his son. As Jennifer draws herself ever closer to Kord, her hidden financial woes are revealed, making Kord suspicious of Jennifer’s motives and unsettling Kord’s already complicated personal relationship with a female police detective.

Having growing doubts about the case, Kord is haunted by a musical ghost connected to the mystery surrounding her disappeared father. Seeking solace by reconnecting with her Iranian violinist Mum, she only finds discord in their relationship. Kord remains conflicted between the crescendo of facts suggesting Howarth’s innocence and her musical instincts screaming he’s a talentless fraud. Knowing she must decide which to trust, Kord does what she always has and listens for clues in the music.

After Catherine Howarth is killed by a victim of her sadistic grooming, her true identity is revealed to be Tiffany, Howarth’s former drug addict girlfriend who’d been enslaved by her dealer. Shattered by the sudden death of his wife, Howarth is confronted by Kord, who’s detected a song of Stanley’s, hiding like a ghostly interloper inside Howarth’s supposed original draft of CHILDHOOD. Pressured by Kord’s revelation, Howarth confesses to stealing CHILDHOOD and selling it as his own work to pay off Tiffany’s menacing dealer. Having rescued his beloved Tiffany, Howarth claims he became trapped in his deceit by the show's meteoric success. A desperate Howarth destroys the evidence of Kord’s discovery and flees.

Nicki’s audacious revenge conspiracy is laid bare when Kord proves the CHILDHOOD score delivered to her by Jennifer, is indeed a fake. The vengeful Nicki confesses to cajoling Stanley into forging the score in a final bid to reclaim his stolen masterpiece, enabling Nicki to weaponise it against his father, using Jennifer as an unwitting accomplice.

Determined to locate Stanley’s lost demo tape, the only remaining proof of CHILDHOOD’s provenance, Kord follows a trail of decoys back to Alice, who has it hidden in plain sight. Justifying her subterfuge, Alice cites jealous Tiffany’s terrifying death threats which had made the tape her only guarantee of safety. But with Tiffany gone, Alice has the courage to leak the tape to the press and expose the truth of the Howarths’ corruption. As the news breaks, the CHILDHOOD franchise crumbles.

A disgraced Howarth tries to do his time quietly, but the dealer, maimed decades earlier by a vengeful Tiffany, is also on the inside. Having clocked Tiffany’s transformation from the media coverage of the case, he finally gets to exact retribution in a savage knife attack on Howarth. 

Walking through London’s theatre-land listening to ASMR on headphones, Kord gets a call from her loyal police detective, needing Kord’s help with a new case.